CuratedLA interviews Comedian Wyatt Fair

👋 WYATT FAIR is a sketch comedian, stand-up, writer, and actor based out of Los Angeles. He performs with the sketch comedy group Shrimp Boys and as a member of the alternative comedy collective Helltrap Nightmare. He was featured in Sarah Squirm’s “Flayaway” on Adult Swim and performed at the Onion Comedy and Arts Festival in Chicago.​​​​​​​

I sat down with a Curator of Comedy, WYATT FAIR, about his background, living with his great friend Sara Sherman (SNL), his parent’s political views that prevented his American birth, and hanging out with his girlfriend.

@MALIBUSMOSTWYATT

BUT FIRST!
WHO ARE THE SHRIMP BOYS?

FEATURING: in addition to Wyatt Fair, David Brown (Jury Duty) and Luke Taylor (Adult Swim).

THE SHRIMP BOYS are an LA-based alternative sketch comedy group. They do genre-based weird guy comedy for the film and stage, relying heavily on multimedia elements and screaming at each other. The Shrimp Boys have been on Adult Swim, performed on The Onion Comedy and Arts Festival, and are members of the comedy collective Helltrap Nightmare.​​​​​​​ The Shrimp Boys are represented by APA.

@ THESHRIMPBOYS

I was born in Hong Kong. My parents lived there for a few years. 

They were sort of liberal ex-patriots. My parents were frustrated about the election at the time, which was George H. W. Bush, and they said, ‘we are getting out of this country, this country is going to shit!’

I grew up in Laguna Beach and went to elementary school at a place called El Morro. 

As a kid, I was pretty precocious, curt and smart. Not a know it all, because I wasn’t loud enough, but I liked learning, especially about animals. 

I was very interested in creatures, I was one of those plastic lizard guys that would always play around with whatever little plastic crap I could find. When I got a video camera growing up, I would make short films and do little voices.

My dad passed away a couple of years ago, but was a musician and a landlord, I guess. 

In the nineties, my parents bought a property and ran it. So he kind of managed that, had some music gigs here and there, music production, and he was a stay-at-home Dad.

He was a good dad, but I also sometimes think, ‘maybe he should have had a job.’

My mom is still alive and lives in Georgia with my brother, near where my mom grew up in Florence, South Carolina.

And I have two brothers, I am in the middle. 

In middle school, I was like, the most uncoordinated and polite skate punk. I liked filming or going around and going to different places and having freedom. But I was also a nervous kid, so I was pretty much there for the vibes, not to skate.

I got into theater in high school, and was always doing plays and writing plays.

I went to college at Northwestern and I studied theater there, it was a great program. The Northwestern Theater Program had all the students do the work on their own, it was a huge student run program. And that really drew me into writing comedy. 

After college, I moved to Chicago. 

Chicago was a big decision right after college, but I had been doing comedy all throughout college and Chicago felt like, and is, a place where you can build your own communities, wherever that might be. 

In Chicago, I moved in with my longtime friend Sarah Sherman (SNL). Sarah and I started this show at the end of college called Helltrap Nightmare. It was gonna be kind of a horror comedy show, and we had a group message thread called Helltrap Nightmare. We didn’t really know what it was gonna be.

But we just started something. 

Sarah was the face of it and certainly the main reason as to why the show took off, but we turned our group from the collective into a sketch comedy trio called, ‘The Shrimp Boys.’ 

We would all host at this place called the Hideout in Chicago, a music venue, doing this weird comedy show. It was half play, half sketches, with a lot of weird video elements.

In our first live video, we were shrimp caterers who brought shrimp to the venue. We had our friend film us live while the film was being projected into the venue. There was a timed clock where we had to get to the venue before the end of the show. 

Then throughout the night, we would check in, show our progress, and get progressively more beat up. 

It was nice being in Chicago, I had the opportunity to perform and if I didn’t do well that night, I was ok with it because we were often doing strange things in front of drunk people. It was like comic book style, just being weirdos.

Movies. I am certainly a regular at the AMC Burbank 16. I am also playing the new Baldur’s Gate 3. 

I have also been editing more videos recently for other people, and bought a new digital camcorder over the summer that I have been playing around with. 

And of course, performing comedy. It’s fun to be your own creative engine.

I would say the ‘watching,’ for me, particularly for this question, is the video game portion of my life. That’s my downtime. That to me is proper escapism and unwinding.

I’m reading this book called ‘The City & The City,’ by China Miéville. It’s a crime drama. 

Cindy’s in Eagle Rock. Local diner, I often go with my girlfriend or other comics.

A spot called Verdugo Bar. 

I’m the type of guy that likes to go to the same places over and over again. LA can feel pretty spread out. There were a lot of those types of bars in Chicago. It’s sort of few and far between here, but there are some great gems in LA. 

It is sort of like a ghost town of dreams. A beautiful nightmare, I suppose. It’s like hell. Everybody's lives have been ruined here for decades, and decades, and decades, but yet, everybody hangs around.

It is the place where you go to make it happen.

I would like to think that I am one of the foot soldiers. A comedy layman putting bricks down one at a time.